‘Data that Cares’, a report into the Adult Health and Social Care market using our data

We are pleased to announce the release of the FCC/IPPR report ‘Data that Cares’! This is a report into the Adult Health and Social Care Market that breaks new ground in analysis of this sector. Our analysis and data revealed that 5-6% of the market is at ‘risk’. This means that circa 25,000 beds are at ‘risk’. We defined ‘risk’ in this instance as providers with negative equity and assets.

Linking data to obtain insights

Spend Network deployed big data and machine learning techniques to automatically linked three discrete datasets. We then conducted analysis into the financial health of the sector based on company records and spending data. With FCC, we analysed the performance of social care providers by size, type and location and provided insights into the effect of these on quality. We also explored the use of financial metrics as possible indicators of (potential) financial distress.

Matching the data

Spend Network has one of the largest datasets of publicly available spend transactions. Our team used this to generate as complete a picture as possible of spend data related to residential social care provision on the part of public bodies in England. We applied pertinent search terms to our dataset, and made over 1.3m lines of spend data available for analysis for the period 2016-19. These 1.3m lines represent almost £50bn in public spend. They span commissioning on the part of local authorities, the NHS and other public bodies. Our data spans the full range of social care services (i.e. including residential, domiciliary and other forms of care provision). We linked this dataset to CQC’s own as well as Companies House records.

This exercise is novel because it adds a further, data based dimension to analysis of this market. This can supplement traditional methods for assessing quality of care provision. With better data we can expand our analysis and continue to identify areas of improvement.

You can read the full report here